hounds are brooding in my bones
by pretzzell
Summary: Jemma Simmons comes home a completely different person from when she left.


**hounds are brooding in my bones;  
** _disclaimed_.

Jemma Simmons came out of the rock on a Sunday.

The monolith coughed her up with not a hack but a whoosh, expelling the scientist the way people expel a breath of air they didn't realize they were holding. The monolith seemed relieved to be rid of its captor, as it faded back from liquid to stone, but Jemma Simmons wheezed and choked on the oxygen filling her lungs, as if she hadn't had a taste of air for the entirety of her captivity.

Five weeks, four days, 11 hours, 6 minutes. She returned at 3:17 A.M.

Her sputtering woke up the only one who still had hope that she would return. Fitz had taken to sleeping on a cot in the room with the monolith, much to Mack's displeasure, waiting patiently for the day his best friend would return.

He woke to her hacking, just in time to see her turn herself over from her back, arm propped beneath her as she coughed up black liquid from her lungs. It took Fitz a moment to realize what he was going on, but once he did, he was throwing his blankets back, slipping over to the box she was still contained within, the monolith hovering over her menacingly. He fumbled with the lock, scrambling to key in the code. He desperately pulled the door open, wearily glaring at the black stone as he pulled Jemma out of the case, his arms looped under hers, and kicked the door shut after she was free, setting her down for a moment to lock it once more.

Jemma was still coughing ink out of her lungs, trying to regain her breath, oxygen burning her windpipe and somehow filling her with both relief and dread, fire growing inside her and expanding into her fingertips. Suddenly, Fitz was there, hands reaching out towards her but afraid to touch, shaking as he looked at her, shock and anxiety and hope swimming in his eyes. With one ragged and shaky inhale, Jemma Simmons collapsed.

She was put into quarantine. "We don't know what happened to her in there, man," Mack explained to Fitz as he locked the door on the glass room she was being held in for observation, the same room that had once contained Skye after the tunnels. "We need to keep her contained."

"Contained?" Fitz repeated, voice strained. "She hasn't done anything. Sk-"

The younger agent had been watching Jemma as she slept from outside the room, standing a little ways from Fitz and Mack as they argued. She turned to Fitz as he began with her old name, eyebrow raised.

"Sorry, _Daisy_ ," Fitz corrected himself, rubbing at the back of his next. He was never going to get used to calling the hacker by her given name. "Please tell Mack that Jemma's fine, that there's nothing wrong with her. She doesn't need to be in quarantine!"

With a sigh, Daisy came over to them, placing a hand on Fitz's arm. "I'm sorry, Fitz, but I think Mack is right to keep her in there. Jiaying said that stone was meant to destroy Inhumans. We have no idea what it did to Simmons and we won't know until she wakes up and we can talk to her. Please, I want her out as much as you do." _Maybe more_. "But this is safest for everyone. Especially all the Inhumans here."

Fitz narrowed his eyes at her, turning back to Jemma in her bed. Mack raised an eyebrow at Daisy, jerking his head over to the doorway. She obliged, following him out of the room, casting a lingering glance at Jemma.

"Keep an eye on her, alright?" Mack whispered once they were out of Fitz's earshot.

Daisy nodded, her eyes cast low. "Do you really think she might be dangerous?"

Mack shrugged. "I'm not sure. But we have to be cautious here. Nothing good has come from having that rock here. Nothing. At least we can try to destroy it now that Agent Simmons is back. You got any ideas on how to do that?"

With a shake her head, Daisy muttered, "no. And honestly, I don't think you should have the Inhumans try at all. It feels wrong, being around that thing."

Mack nodded and clapped a hand onto her shoulder. A few months ago, Skye would have come close to crumbling under the force. But Daisy stood strong, not even flinching. "Thanks, Tremors. I'll let you know if I need anything."

He left and Daisy returned to the infirmary and Jemma's quarantine cell. Fitz had pulled a chair up to sit next to the clear wall, where Jemma would easily be able to see him once he woke. He was fiddling with some device, trying to occupy himself as he waited for his best friend to regain consciousness. Daisy pulled up a chair as well, settling herself in to wait.

Daisy had never told to anyone, but the Monolith made her skin crawl. Literally.

She could feel the frequency of everything in the base. As she grew more and more used to her powers, her ability to tap into those frequencies, they faded into the background. But as soon as the Monolith had been brought in, she felt its frequency first and foremost, like a mosquito buzzing persistently in her head, refusing to leave her alone. If she ever got close enough to it, she could feel its vibrations fill her as she began to shake on the same wavelength. She couldn't be in the same room as the stone – she felt like it would shake the skin right off her and turn her bones to dust.

But when Jemma had been sucked into the stone, the shaking of her skin stopped. The loudness that had been ringing in her head and in her stomach stopped and everything was quiet, quiet, quiet. It felt like she was twenty feet underwater and forgot what the world sounded like. At first, she had been relieved. That relief quickly turned to terror.

Now that Jemma was back, the mosquito noise was back, but quieter, more dulled than before. She didn't know what to make of it and the only person she had once trusted enough to talk to about this sort of thing, well, Jiaying was dead after she had tried to feed off Daisy's life force and Daisy had killed her. The thing that frightened her most, however, was that the noise didn't seem to quite be coming from the basement room that housed the Monolith anymore.

Three nights after the stone coughed Jemma up, Mack, Fitz, and a team of agents stood in the same room. Hazmat suits had been donned and they worked to set up a device Fitz had developed with Mack to hopefully destroy the stone. But after the thing had sucked up Jemma and spit her back out again, they weren't sure how it would defend itself. They were treating it like a sentient being, something capable of basic instincts. For all they knew, it was much, much smarter.

After setting up the mechanisms and cameras and prepping the box containing the Monolith to be opened remotely, Mack cleared the room. They had set up a control station on the ground floor and the entire base had been emptied except for all essential personnel. Everyone else had been moved offsite to a separate base; it made more sense to move them than to risk moving the Monolith again.

One of the agents on Mack's team gave the all clear, and Mack looked to Fitz, giving the engineer the go-ahead. "It's all yours, Turbo."

Fitz nodded, tapping a few times on his tablet before looking at the agents around him. "Everybody ready? Here we go..."

Daisy knew the instant something changed. The buzzing that had been faint and distant moments before had suddenly erupted in her head, her skin crawling and shivering, her bones shaking and grinding. She fell to her knees, hands coming up to her head. A loud scream reached her a moment later, coming from the direction of Jemma's quarantine. Pushing the tingling in her spine aside, Daisy got to her feet and raced down the hall toward Jemma's screaming.

Her friend was crouched on the floor, tucked in the corner between her bed and the wall. Her hands covered her ears as she screamed, one eye red from a blood vessel that had burst from the force of her screaming. She was staring straight ahead but it was clear she couldn't see what was right in front of her – it was as if she was straining to see in the sort of pitch-blackness that only occurs deep underground.

Daisy slammed into the glass around Jemma's quarantine, yelling the scientist's name, struggling to be heard over her screams. And all at once, everything stopped.

Her skin stopped crawling, Jemma stopped screaming, the world stopped buzzing. There was dead silence; the only thing she recognized was the background humming of all the frequencies surrounding her.

"Jemma? Jemma, are you okay? Jemma, please, talk to me! Jemma!"

But the other woman has her eyes shut and she's rocking back and forth in her corner, silent at first but whimpering a few moments later. Daisy banged her hand on the glass, trying to get her friend's attention. The other woman started shaking her head while she rocked.

"Oh, for the love of-" Daisy moved to the door and opened it, protocol and Mack be damned.

Jemma stopped rocking as the doors _whooshed!_ open and Daisy came in, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Jemma, hey, what's wrong?" The buzzing had started in her head again and she looked closely at her friend's drooping head. "Jemma?"

The scientist moved suddenly, throwing a hand out and sending Daisy flying backwards with strength she didn't know the other woman possessed. Jemma raised her head to look at her, brown eyes steely and one shot with blood. She was angry and unwavering, not a touch of confusion or misunderstanding in her voice when she said, "Who the hell is Jemma?"

 **A/N:** so this a skimmons winter soldier type au starring jemma as bucky barnes and daisy as steve rogers. this is also my first time posting on ao3 so please review! this is also all that i have written so far and if you would like to read more, please please let me know! thank you so much for reading, i hope you enjoyed!


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